Thursday, February 23, 2017

In storage spaces direct you can run Get-StorageJob to see the progress of rebuilds/resyncs. The following powershell snippet allows you to continually refresh the status of the rebuild operation so that you know when things are back to normal.

function RefreshStorageJobStatus () { while($true) { Get-VirtualDisk | ft; Write-Host "-----------"; Get-StorageJob;Start-Sleep -s 1;Clear-Host; } }
Enter the above in powershell on one line. Then enter "RefreshStorageJobStatus" to start the script. The output should look similar to the following and refresh every second:

Monday, February 13, 2017

Is it a supported scenario to run a AD domain controller in a VM on a hyper-converged S2D cluster? We're looking to deploy a 4-node hyper-converged S2D cluster at a remote site. We would like to run the domain controller for the site on the cluster so we don't need to purchase a 5th server. Will the S2D cluster be able to boot if the network links to the site are down (meaning other domain controllers are not accessible)? I know WS2012 allowed for AD-less cluster bootstrapping but will the underlying mechanics uses for storage access in S2D in WS2016 work without AD? Is this a supported scenario? AD-less S2D cluster bootstrapping?

I asked this question in the Microsoft forums. I did not get a definitive answer from anyone. So I set it up and tested it and it appears to work. I don't know if it's officially supported or not but it does work. The S2D virtual disks and volumes comes up with out a domain controller. At which point you can start the domain controller VM if it did not start automatically. I didn't dig into things, but I have a feeling it's using NTLM authentication and would likely fail if your domain requires Kerberos?